Abstract— Typically, photovoltaic arrays encounter a sharp drop in efficiency during the mid to late periods of their service life. The main reason of this unpleasant phenomenon is the nonuniform aging of photovoltaic modules. In order to improve the arrays efficiency in such situations, several definitive and evolutionary rearrangement algorithms have been introduced. In this paper, in order to model the non-uniformity of modules aging, each module has been considered as a series connection of 3 submodules with different aging conditions. Then using the short circuit current as an indicator for the health status of each submodule, an offline rearrangement strategy is proposed by combining the genetic algorithm and a hierarchical elimination process for detecting the weak module groups. In the proposed strategy, the chance of finding an arrangement with more generated power has been increased. In addition, the inverter voltage range has been considered as a constraint. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach, it is tested on a PV array with 6 modules and the results are compared with other conventional methods.
